I've been reading a lot about Parkinson's Disease research, including especially stem cell research. "Now that the president is in favour, [advocate Michael J] Fox observes wryly, "there is no money" for Congress to pay for it." Am I the only one to notice this pattern: when R's are in charge, they call stem cell research "immoral" (though they launch phony wars killing thousands of people including children); when D's are in charge, they call stem cell research "unaffordable" (though they launch infinite mandatory spending on entrenched industry revenue models)? Are there any SF Bay area companies researching a cure for Parkinson's Disease, and what experience have they had?

Update 2016: in addition to the continuously updated list of projects in this thread, anyone interested in this topic should see the Michael J. Fox Foundation site.

@Patrick, this thread is veering off topic and into a recurring flame war that has already littered other parts of PatNet. The flames are not commercial Spam, but is there a permissible way to remove them before they hijack the thread? Free speech doesn't benefit from burying the comments about Parkinson's research under a flaming haystack of goat feed.

Thanks - for a while there was an option for the user who posted a new thread to deleted comments from it, and for a while those comments went to a different thread for deleted comments. I could start Ignoring people but I would miss their other comments. People have strengths and weaknesses, and everyone is imperfect. Ignore vs Unignore seems too binary when talking about something as complex as a person.

Trump doesn't actually exist. The entire election was staged. America hasn't had an actual election since 1856. The Know-Nothing Party has been ruling as a monarchy ever since then, simply faking elections to keep the general population from revolting. Over the past century and a half, the real rulers have gotten board and tried to entertain themselves by making politics more and more ridiculous to see if the public catches on. Their joke has grown to ridiculous proportions.

In actuality, Trump is a Max-Headroom-like A.I. designed to entertain people as a buffoon. The Electoral College, which has been stoned since 1963, recoded him to run for president as a goof and forgot to terminate the process. They are all passed out right now, but when the munchies set in, I suspect they will hold an emergency "election" and Shia LaBeouf will be elected.

In an early clinical trial in humans, the researchers used an existing drug to shift a population of white blood cells from a destructive mode to a protective state that can help defend against brain injury.

While the drug is sometimes used in patients receiving chemotherapy, it has not been used previously in Parkinsonâ€™s.

Not only did the researchers document the shift through blood tests, molecular studies and brain imaging, but they also saw preliminary evidence of improved motor skills in several patients who received the treatment, including a reduction in the diseaseâ€™s characteristic tremors and improvements in tasks such as buttoning a shirt.

Currently, drugs and other treatments can be used to fight symptoms, but the effects generally give way to the disease in the long run.
***
â€œItâ€™s new, itâ€™s exciting, and the mechanism is designed to affect the disease rather than treat symptoms,â€ said Dr. Howard Gendelman, chairman of UNMCâ€™s pharmacology and experimental neuroscience department.

Gendelman and R. Lee Mosley, a professor of pharmacology and experimental neuroscience and head of UNMCâ€™s movement disorders research laboratory, led the study, a report on which appeared Thursday in the Nature Research journal npj Parkinsonâ€™s disease.
***
Gendelman said the researchers wouldnâ€™t start a new study for a year or more, after theyâ€™ve reviewed data and improved drug formulation and administration.
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Gendelman said a group of researchers from Taiwan published similar results last week, further validating the Nebraska teamâ€™s work. The Taiwanese group studied four patients but followed them for two years. At least eight other research groups around the world are pursuing the pathway in a variety of conditions.
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he collaborators recently received renewed funding from the Michael J. Fox Foundation to further the work, focusing on a second-generation product that offers an improvement in the drug and a more patient-friendly route of administration â€” oral, rather than injection.

But Gendelman stressed that the basic work is homegrown in Nebraska, dating back roughly 20 years, and has been helped along by funding from local individuals and groups.
***
The study involved 20 Parkinsonâ€™s patients â€” 10 received the drug, 10 got a placebo. Neither the patients nor the researchers knew who was receiving the drug and who was not. The researchers also studied 17 people who did not have Parkinsonâ€™s, known as controls, for comparison.

The researchers followed the patients for six months â€” two months before starting treatment, two months on treatment and two months after treatment ended. Patients generally tolerated the drug well, although some had mild to moderate side effects."

No drug is yet proven and approved to slow the progression of Parkinson's Disease. Isradipine is approved for other purposes and is currently in stage III trials regarding Parkinson's Disease. Doxycycline is also approved for other purposes but has yet to begin clinical trials for Parkinson's disease. Physical exercise is probably the best known way to slow the progression of Parkinson's Disease, but it does not work perfectly, and many patients have other problems that limit physical exercise.

So it seems as if T-cells might be fooled into thinking the body's dopamine producing brain cells are foreign due to a build-up of alpha-synculein, and somehow attacking them.

Genetic studies have also shown Parkinson's disease is linked with a variation in genes active in the immune response, adding further reason to suspect mistaken T-cells are responsible for the destruction of the brain's nerve cells.

"It remains to be seen whether the immune response to alpha-synuclein is an initial cause of Parkinson's, or if it contributes to neuronal death and worsening symptoms after the onset of the disease," said researcher Alessandro Sette from the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology.

In recent years, the evidence has been mounting linking the gut with Parkinson's disease, with gut bacteria stirring up trouble, and possibly affecting the brain via the vagus nerve."

The hallmark brain damage in Parkinsonâ€™s disease is thought to be the work of a misfolded, rogue protein that spreads from brain cell to brain cell like an infection. Now, researchers have found that the normal form of the proteinâ€”Î±-synuclein (Î±S)â€”may actually defend the intestines against invaders by marshaling key immune cells. But chronic intestinal infections could ultimately cause Parkinsonâ€™s, the scientists suggest, if Î±S migrates from overloaded nerves in the gut wall to the brain.

â€œThe gut-brain immune axis seems to be on a cusp of an explosion of new insights, and this work offers an exceptionally exciting new hypothesis,â€ says Charles Bevins, an expert in intestinal immunity at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved with the study."

curious2 - Not sure if you have read this yet. "Could Low-fat Dairy Boost Your Risk of Parkinsonâ€™s Disease? One Study Says Yes"

Consuming at least three servings of low-fat dairy per day is enough to increase the risk of developing Parkinsonâ€™s disease by 34 percent, compared to consuming less than one serving daily.

So says a study, â€œIntake of Dairy Foods and Risk of Parkinson Disease,â€ published in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN).

For the study, researchers at Bostonâ€™s Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health used answers from 80,736 women enrolled in the Nursesâ€™ Health Study and 48,610 men in the Health Professionalsâ€™ Follow-up Study. This covers a nearly 25-year period during which 1,036 of the participants developed Parkinsonâ€™s.

The team, led by Katherine Hughes, looked at what kind of dairy products each person consumed, including milk, cheese, yogurt, butter, margarine and sherbet. Researchers first analyzed if full-fat dairy was linked to an increase in Parkinsonâ€™s disease risk. When they didnâ€™t find any such link, they moved on to assess if those consuming low-fat dairy would have an increased risk.

Unlike some other studies, I would definitely recommend anyone eligible consider enrolling in this particular study. The people involved are highly reputable, the drug is already widely used for other purposes and thus has a well known safety profile, and results are due in 2020, sooner than almost anything else.

SURE-PD3 will also collect additional data from some participants using the smartphone app mPower, which uses phone sensors to track symptoms of PD. Integrating wearable technology into SURE-PD3 may bolster participant engagement and can provide researchers with greater information on how the study drug affects the progression of motor symptoms.

Individuals diagnosed with PD within the past three years who have low blood urate levels and show dopamine loss on an imaging DaTscan, among other criteria, are eligible for the SURE-PD3 trial."

It'll be interesting to see where the healthcare shitstorm ends. Seems to me that the Repubs are more interested in repealing Obamacare than in fixing it or finding a suitable alternative. With a president that is childish and vindictive this is what we're stuck with. Fuck

People with Parkinson's disease are about four times more likely to develop melanoma skin cancer, and conversely, people with melanoma have a fourfold higher risk of getting Parkinson's, researchers report.
Although doctors have known about the connection between these diseases, they still don't know why having one increases the risk of the other.

"Future research should focus on identifying common genes, immune responses and environmental exposures that may link these two diseases," said study first author Dr. Lauren Dalvin, who's with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

"If we can pinpoint the cause of the association between Parkinson's disease and melanoma, we will be better able to counsel patients and families about their risk of developing one disease in the setting of the other," she said in a Mayo news release.

Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT) has broad potential extending far beyond Parkinson's, but so far it's only been tried in mice and pigs, so I'll comment here rather than start a new Post. The reseaerch team at Ohio State University have applied to FDA to start human trials next year.

Results of the regenerative medicine study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"By using our novel nanochip technology, injured or compromised organs can be replaced. We have shown that skin is a fertile land where we can grow the elements of any organ that is declining," said Dr. Chandan Sen, director of Ohio State's Center for Regenerative Medicine & Cell Based Therapies, who co-led the study with L. James Lee, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering with Ohio State's College of Engineering in collaboration with Ohio State's Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.

Researchers studied mice and pigs in these experiments. In the study, researchers were able to reprogram skin cells to become vascular cells in badly injured legs that lacked blood flow. Within one week, active blood vessels appeared in the injured leg, and by the second week, the leg was saved. In lab tests, this technology was also shown to reprogram skin cells in the live body into nerve cells that were injected into brain-injured mice to help them recover from stroke.

The (free) Science Daily article excerpted above contains a link directly to the full Nature Nanotechnology article, which may require a subscription.

Evolution may have been our planet's first recycler. When organisms evolved useful proteins, they tend to get re-used in unrelated processes. So, a single family of proteins may regulate the development of everything from the brain to the blood to the bones.

This is one reason that drugs often have off-target effects. While the drug was designed to latch on to a specific protein in one tissue, that protein or a close relative may be doing something important in a different tissue. While that's generally viewed as a problem, it can also be helpful. Researchers are finding that some drugs can be effective against diseases for which they were never intended.

That may be the case for an asthma medication called clenbuterol. It and a series of related drugs came through a screen that targeted a very different disorder: Parkinson's disease, caused by the death of specific nerve cells in the brain. And a search through the drug-use history of Norway suggests that the discovery is more than a fluke.

Northwestern Medicine scientists have identified a toxic cascade that leads to neuronal degeneration in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and figured out how to interrupt it, reports a study to be published September 7 in the journal Science.

Intervening with an antioxidant early in the disease process may break the degenerative cycle and improve neuron function in PD, the study showed.

The scientists also discovered that mouse models of PD didn't have the same abnormalities they found in human PD neurons, revealing the importance of studying human neurons to develop new therapies.

Dr. Dimitri Krainc, the Aaron Montgomery Ward Professor and chair of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, is the study senior author. Lena Burbulla, a postdoctoral fellow in Krainc's laboratory, is first author.

The research was started about six years ago in Krainc's lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was completed in the last four years at Feinberg.